Performance Evaluation of PID and Backstepping Controllers for a Symmetrical Y-shaped Tricopter UAV

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being utilized across a wide range of industries, driving the need for highly efficient control systems to ensure safe and stable flight, while meeting the demands for cost-effectiveness, and simpler configurations. To address these requirements, this paper proposes a streamlined design for a symmetrical Y-shaped tricopter, incorporating a single tiltrotor for yaw control. A mathematical model of the tricopter developed using Newton-Euler's method, is simulated in MATLAB, employing both PID and Backstepping controllers. Comparative analysis reveals that the Backstepping controller outperforms the PID controller, demonstrating improved stability and superior position and attitude control performance, with reduced yaw overshoot by 82.941% and undershoot by 99.99%.